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STRUCTURE AND AGENCY IN ACHOLI GENOCIDE, NORTHERN
UGANDA.
Introduction
Genocide as political program and military policy does not occur by inadvertence but by deliberately orchestrated actions resulting in the destruction of a targeted group. To conceal it, modern genocide perpetrators have intentionally harnessed a synergy of debilitating factors such as infectious diseases, starvation and enforced hopelessness to execute the extermination policy. The high mortality caused by such debilities would have otherwise been benign if the targeted population was not entrapped in an environment where mass death could expeditiously occur. In the Acholi genocide debate, Olara Otunnu, a former United Nation's Under-Secretary General for Children in Armed Conflict, argues that the Government of Uganda has knowingly created an environment where mass murder of the Acholi population would occur. But General David Tinyefunza of Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF), formerly, the National Resistance Movement/Army (NRM/A), and presidential advisor on security disagrees. He argues that the UPDF is providing security in "protected villages" and the mass murders are because of war. But war usually allows a regime to hide the implementation of mass murder from the international community and media and the gullible domestic population. It also enables a regime to shift blame for mass murder on the other combatant army, and at times, on the victims for theirextermination. Most important of all, war allows the spreading of xenophobia and homicidal hate, necessary ingredients for the extermination of a targeted group. I will examine the politics and the strategy of the
war between General Museveni's UPDF and General Kony's Lord Resistance Army
(LRA) to unravel the contours of Acholi genocide. Did the civil war offer the
excuse and the occasion to execute the final solution against the Acholi
population? What ideology and justifications have precipitated the destruction
of the Acholi population? What roles have state institutions played in
perpetrating the mass deaths of the Acholi population? How has the military
policy of "protection" harnessed the debilitating synergies to exterminate the
Acholi population? Against this background, I will test the hypothesis of
advertence through harnessing a synergy of debilities in comparison with that of
offering security in "protected villages." The aim is to show how the confluence
of factors that have synergistically caused mass deaths of the Acholi population
came into being and what arguments have been used to sustain it. In the
foregoing analysis, I will examine the nature of the state that can commit
genocide against its own population. In the second, I will examine the role of
the mass media in the genocide against the Acholi population. In the third, I
will analyze the military strategy pursued by the UPDF and the LRA; and, the
response of the media. In the fourth, I will examine the response of the
international community. Finally, an attempt will be made to uncover the
political and military policy that have concealed and deliberately harnessed
mortal synergies of genocide against the Acholi population.
1. CREATING A GENOCIDE STATE: NRM/A REGIME AND
GENOCIDE
The account of genocide that ignores the role of the state in the destruction of a target group is incomplete. In Uganda, the state took the form of a one-party dictatorship known as "the Movement System." Every Ugandan citizen, young and old, was forced by law to become a member. It followed that all military and local level leaders were chosen from among the Movement Cadres, who graduated from Kyankwanzi Political School, a college where "virulent xenophobia and racism" according to one graduate cadre, "was officially taught." The Movement System was so ubiquitous that the NRM/A regime was truly a totalitarian state. Here, General Museveni could pursue a life presidency project, uncontested. Democracy, which could provide for a peaceful contest for leadership, was demonized as sectarian, divisive, backward and anti-human. Sorrowfully enough, western donor governments promoted and financed the one-party totalitarian state, which was in contradiction with what they have promoted around the world as necessary for good governance, respect for human rights and equitable development. With western governments' complicity, the NRM/A regime used the mass media to scapegoat the Acholi population for the deaths in Luwero, a district where General Museveni fought the Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA) of the late President Milton Obote. We must be clear that the Acholi population never fought any community in Uganda and never had an army or a militia group of their own during Obote's regime. However, Museveni needed to scapegoat the Acholi people, as a group, in order to consolidate an ethno-nationalist power base and intimidate any opposition through a militarist policy. Part two continues |
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